Part 1 - Right Now
Yesterday I started performing some maintenance on the download servers. This maintenance will take anywhere from five to eight hours per server so I'm only running it on one server at a time. While the maintenance is taking place on a server it will be slower to respond, slower to transfer data, and more likely to timeout or drop connections. dl1 and dl2 finished last night and as of the writing of this post dl3 is still undergoing maintenance. When that is done dl4 and dl5 will have their turn. Hopefully this will all be over by this time tomorrow.
EDIT: The maintenance is complete everything should be normal on all the download servers again.
Part 2 - News from a couple weeks ago
In other news It may have taken two and a half years for me to get around to it but the series recommendation system has been revived. As you may or may not have noticed most series pages now have list of several other series that you may like if you like the series in question. These recommendations are based on genre similarity between series though so don't put too much faith in them. The series displayed are those that match the most closely and then they are ordered by MT rank. This set up tends to give the best results when a series has several genres though. For series with only one or two genres the list of similar series will look pretty similar since the MT ranking factor will dominate the genre closeness factor. (sorry Yaoi fans).
This system is not set in stone though so if anyone has any (well thought out) suggestions about how it might better recommend series that only have a few genres please let me know. Please keep in mind that basing recommendations on direct user ratings or user behaviors is pretty much out of the question due to the complexity and quantity of calculations needed to work with that sort of data.
Part 3 - News from a month ago
It occurs to me that I never got around to detailing the new features I made last month (nice job on donations in August month by the way, thanks again to everyone donated). To put it simply, I added functions to make browsing for series and oneshots much easier.
If you go to:
http://www.mangatraders.com/manga/serieslistextended you will see several new options for sorting and pruning the default alphabetical list of series. You'll also find that there is more information displayed about each series than on the normal series list. The preview image, author, MT Rating and rank, and the first part of the series summary are all displayed on the extended series list. Using the new pruning features if you want to look only for series which contain certain genres, or are of a certain type, or are completely available on MT you can. In addition, the pruning and filtering settings are all based on URL so you can bookmark a combination of sorting and pruning and check back to see what it's matched periodically. Combining genre pruning with the ability to sort series and oneshots by date allows you to create something of a genre watch list for example. I would recommend anyone who likes to browse randomly for series using the genre search system switch over to the extended series list instead. The search system was designed to find very specific series. The extended series list should be much better for browsing though series matching rougher criteria.
I have also made similar changes to the oneshot listings. If you go to
http://www.mangatraders.com/manga/oneshots you'll see a similar set up to the Extended Series List. You can now sort the one shots by their add date or by their and prune for the genres you want to see.
Part 4 - News from a possible future
I'll probably make some more features, since you all never seem satisfied. Genre Filtering could conceivably make a limited appearance in places like the main latest uploads page or the extended series list. I make no guarantees though. There might also be other reasonable suggestions floating around in the Suggestions thread but I haven't had the chance to look for a while.
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